A Closer Look: Dave Miglin

Vice president of interactive services, Strategic America Inc.

Age: 45Hometown: ClevelandFamily: He and his wife, Karen, have an 11-year-old daughter, Ellie, and an 8-year-old son, Evan.

Dave Miglin took his job at Strategic America in July after about two years of consulting with the company on digital initiatives. In his new position, he’s in charge of the company’s digital marketing strategy. He has worked in advertising for about 25 years and has held senior positions with New York-based TMP Worldwide, and Atlanta area-based AppVault and PinDot Media. Miglin, who moved to Des Moines from Atlanta, is well-versed on marketing strategies for different generations.

Why were you attracted to the job at Strategic America?

When you work with somebody for two years, you get to know them. One thing that’s always impressed me about Strategic America has been the culture and the people. The people I’ve worked with have probably been some of the hardest-working people I’ve known professionally. They are serious about their work, but they like to have fun at the same time. So our culture here is all about doing everything we can for our clients, but enjoying the environment in which we work. So when you walk around our building, you’ll see that we celebrate our clients at every turn. As far as my role I’m taking over, it was that I definitely felt like I could make a difference here.

You say you want to help take Strategic America to new heights. What are those heights?

I want for Strategic America to be a recognized leader in the digital, mobile, social space. We do a lot of great work in all three of those areas now. ... My goal is to make sure that work is recognized and that clients will be calling more frequently for that service.

How do you market to different generations?

So often people kind of take a guerrilla marketing approach to different things. Advertising, sometimes the simple approach is create a campaign, run it, and just run it for everybody. But generationally, we’ve been influenced and our preferences reflect the products and events and environment that we were raised in. Generation X (born between 1965 and 1980) ... we don’t like a hard sales approach because we think you are trying to sell us something. We want to be consulted with. We’re smart people. We consider ourselves smart. Baby Boomers (born 1946 to 1964) are like that too, but they want a lot more detail than what Generation X does. Generation X wants bullet point, bullet point, bullet point. Boomers, they need more detail. They are a fine-print generation.

How do you market to Millennials?

I would try to tie my message to social impact. I would want them to feel appreciated. I would want them to know that by buying from me, you are making a difference in a positive way. They are very socially minded. They are civic-minded. They care about their environment, and I mean literally the environment. They are the generation that feels like Generation X and Baby Boomers totally screwed it up, so they are very socially inclined. They are changing the world through social media. They are connecting in a mobile setting and a social setting, and they want to change the world. If I were marketing to them, I would want to really emphasize how my product makes a difference to them.

How do you keep the same message themes across platforms while still delivering different messages to different generations?

The key thing is to understand who is it we are really trying to send this message to, and which devices are we going to use? ... When we message, we use different channels. Where we drive people to needs to reflect who received that message. If it’s a combination, it’s a combination. That’s not impossible of course. But we think for the sheer impact of it, it’s just as affordable to create multiple (website) pages, and you can reword those pages and reformat them (for different audiences).

How do businesses survive in the digital world?

Embrace it. Don’t just say you embrace it. Act on it. Really do it. You aren’t going to see the results overnight sometimes. Take social and mobile. Just because you build a site that’s mobile-friendly doesn’t mean that every bit of your traffic is coming from mobile. If you don’t get them there in other ways, they are not going to know about it. This is a process. (Businesses) are impatient this day and age for change. They feel like, if I advise you to do certain things, I expect a lift immediately. Some things can happen that way ... but what I’m saying is, the technology and the choice of media is changing at such a rapid clip. We have to allot time for experimenting, and you have to be a little patient on results, because you are not going to see them overnight.